Episode 2272 Scott Adams: CWSA Odds Of War & A 2024 Election Prediction
My new book Reframe Your Brain, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/3bwr9fm8
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Content:
Politics, Backwards Science, Multi-Vitamin Study, America's Russian Experts, Guy Kawasaki, Trusting Experts, Hollywood's Pro-Palestine Blacklist, Cancelling Free Speech, Cancelling 2024 Election, President Trump, War With Iran, American Civil War II, Rep. Mike Johnson, AI Godfather Sam Altman, AI Persuasion, America's Debt, Global War, StormCrow_JE, Scott Adams
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of Human Civilization.
Well, alas.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
Some people call it Colonizing with Scott Adams, but that's not fair.
And if you'd like to take your experience up to levels that nobody has even imagined before, well, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
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It's called the simultaneous sip and it can stop wars if you let it.
Go.
So good.
So good.
Well, let's talk about all the things today.
Have you read any good books?
I've got a book that might be suspiciously appropriate for the news today.
You've probably heard of it.
If you tried to buy this book, you couldn't do it.
This is an unbuyable book.
So I wrote it years ago, and it's a fictional story that was really in the form of a prediction.
So this was written 2003-ish, I think.
And it was a prediction for today when the Western world and the, or at least a bunch of powers are in a major, what I would call a religion war.
Right?
And it looks like we're, we'll talk about that.
But if you could find a copy of this, a used copy, it'll blow your fucking mind about how closely I predicted.
So, there's that.
Alright, let's do, uh, there's a new study.
Holy cow, another study.
A large, rigorous one.
I like them when they're large and rigorous.
And it's about multivitamins.
You've heard people say, multivitamins?
You should take them every day.
And other people say, multivitamins?
Oh, by the way, you can read The Religion War for free if you're a member of the Locals community.
So it's on there in text form.
So scottadams.locals.com and then you just search for hashtag thereligionwar.
It'll pop right up as a PDF.
It's another benefit of membership.
Anyway, there's this large study on multivitamins.
Some people say they're great.
Some people say they make no difference.
But this new study says that people who have been taking multivitamins for a long time consistently perform better on common memory tests than those who took a placebo.
So I guess that means that taking vitamins improves your memory.
Right?
Big correlation.
It's a study.
Peer-reviewed.
Peer-reviewed.
Well, maybe.
That might be exactly what's going on here.
Or!
Or!
Backwards science.
Backwards science.
That's when the causation is reversed.
Now let me ask you a question.
If you were to gather together the people from all parts of the country or the world, And you put together the people who have been taking a multivitamin for many years.
Would those people have anything in common with each other that would be different than the average person?
Number one, money.
Do you know what poor people don't do?
Take a lot of fucking vitamins.
That's what they don't do.
I don't know if this was controlled for economics.
It might have been.
But there are other things that they have in common.
What's something else that somebody who takes a multivitamin has in common with other multivitamin takers?
By the time you're taking a multivitamin, you've already become one of those people.
You know what I mean?
One of those people who's looking for every advantage.
One of those people who actually does exercise.
One of those people who actually knows that simple carbs might make you fat.
One of those people who Might even be a moderate drinker instead of a heavy drinker.
Because in all parts of their life, they look for the little advantage and they're going to try to get it.
Now if you took all the people who look for a little advantage in life, in terms of their health, and you check to see if their memory is better or worse than the people who did everything wrong, or at least didn't take vitamins so they weren't that serious about it, Wouldn't you expect the vitamin takers to do better, whether the vitamins work or not?
Am I right?
So why would the normal assumption be that the vitamins help your memory, instead of just saying, people who do everything right, you know, they also take a chance on vitamins.
Yeah, because they don't hurt you.
We have a pretty good history to suggest it won't hurt you to take vitamins.
Although there have been times when You know, I think there were some cases maybe in the past that it could have.
But at the moment, I think we think our vitamins are pretty safe.
So if you could afford it, you'd probably do it.
All right.
Backward science.
I've got another question for you about causation.
I have a hypothesis that goes like this.
That the more intelligence experts we have for a given adversary, the more likely we will go to war with them.
Now you say to yourself, Scott, you've got it backwards.
You've got it all backwards.
The causation's backwards, Scott.
No.
The reason we have lots of intelligence experts for some countries that are our adversaries are because they're our adversaries.
That's obviously why you want to promote and educate people to be intelligence experts, because they're already our adversaries.
Maybe.
Or maybe if you get enough intelligence experts who went to school to figure out what to do if we went to war with Russia, you're going to have a fucking war with Russia.
Because there are too many people talking about it and they act like they're the experts.
And you're not the expert, are you?
You're no expert.
Did you go to school for Russia?
Did you study Russia?
No, you didn't.
You better listen to those experts.
One of them?
No.
Two of them?
No.
Three?
Oh my God!
There are hundreds.
There are now thousands of Russian experts.
And if we don't go to war with Russia, they've wasted their educations.
Their life is a joke.
But if we did, Well, that would be their time, wouldn't it?
So when these Russian experts, who can only validate their own experience by getting tough with Russia, which would include war, what do you think they recommend?
Do you think every time there's a big old meeting with the boss, they say, whatever you do, don't start a war with Russia, because that's going to lead to all kinds of bad stuff and you can't put it back.
No.
They're going to get tough, because they went to school to get tough on Russia.
So, I would argue, That you could predict war by how many intelligence people have gone through the training to be an expert in that area.
Do you think that we have, I'm going to guess, that except for China, where we have probably lots of experts by now, the Middle East and Russia would be the two areas where people have trained the most to work in our intelligence outfits for foreign service.
And is there anything happening in the world right now that involves, oh, the Middle East and Russia?
Yes, it's exactly what you'd fucking expect by the fact that we're producing people whose jobs and lives can only be justified with a big old conflict.
So I'm not sure that anybody is doing anything intentionally.
I think it's a follow the money situation.
If the money went toward trading people, And they would like to keep their jobs and give promotions?
Well, peace isn't exactly the way you get there.
So, people just working on their normal self-interest without even being aware of it.
There may be no conscious thought along those lines, but it would still happen, just by the fact that there are a lot of them.
All right, what about those experts?
You think we should trust the experts when it comes to war?
Well, I was just watching a reel on Instagram from Guy Kawasaki.
He was one of the original Apple founders.
He was the marketing guy at the very beginning.
I think he was one of the first five or something like that.
And he was talking about Steve Jobs' opinion about the experts.
Here's what Steve Jobs says about the experts.
He said, don't trust the experts because they're old and stodgy and they're set in their ways, but sometimes trust yourself.
Well, that's terrible advice, Steve Jobs.
If you ever want to get some bad advice, listen to Steve Jobs.
Do you know why Steve Jobs' advice is so bad?
Because Steve Jobs gives you advice that is suitable only for Steve Jobs.
Only for him.
Do you know why?
Because he was a genius!
Here's the order of who you should trust.
Average people?
Not so much.
Wouldn't trust them so much.
Experts?
I think I would trust the experts more than the average people.
But unfortunately, we have these other jerks who are messing up everything by being smart.
Who would you trust?
Steve Jobs?
Or the computer experts at the time?
Steve Jobs.
I mean, in retrospect, you would have trusted him.
But we only know that now.
However, Steve Jobs was not an ordinary person.
He was one of the few people that you should trust more than the experts.
Now we're watching the country come to war.
What are the experts saying?
Well, the experts are saying whatever they were already inclined to say before this happened.
And what do the people say who are... I will let's say generously say that they're geniuses.
Now in this context genius isn't Einstein genius.
I just say somebody in the top 2%.
The type of person who could get accepted to let's say an Ivy League school back before their admissions were ridiculous.
Do you know anybody like that who is being very outspoken about About the potential for war?
Yeah, there's Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, clearly in the top 2%.
No military expert, right?
So would you listen to Elon Musk about war, or would you listen to the experts?
I'm going to go with Elon Musk every time.
Why?
Because he's smarter than the experts.
And the experts are all biased.
They're just steeped in bias.
Plus their economics are on the line, their promotions, everything.
I would never trust the experts over Elon Musk about a military decision.
And he's not a military expert.
How about David Sachs?
One of the original PayPal guys, Stanford, top 2%, easily in the top 2% of IQ.
Would you trust somebody in the top 2% who's also had a hugely successful career?
I would.
I would trust him over the experts.
Not because he has more expertise, but because in this country, the geniuses are almost always smarter than the experts.
As long as we're all Sort of looking at similar information.
You know, the military has some secret stuff, but probably the most important variables are things we can all see.
So in that specific case, the smart people beat the experts most of the time.
So yes, I would be looking at your Vivek Ramaswamy's.
Is Vivek an average person?
Nope!
Not even close.
Top 2%.
Would you trust Vivek's opinion on war over the experts?
I would not trust the experts over Vivek.
And again, it's not only because I am endorsing him for president, although that helps.
Smart people can beat the experts regularly.
What happened during the pandemic?
Do you remember all the rogues, the people who had, you know, the opposite opinions?
Many of them turned out to be right, didn't they?
Many of them.
And I turned out to be right, probably more than anybody.
If you tested my IQ, where would it be?
Top 2%.
It's a very consistent thing.
So just keep that in mind when you're trusting your experts.
I've talked about the incompetence problem in this country.
And even the trolls are getting worse.
Oh my God, the trolls.
I remember when the trolls would be really good.
They'd like get in there and really get under your skin and say something to really bug you.
Well, here's what happened to me this morning.
I saw a comment to one of my excellent posts on X and somebody named Colorado Dispensary Loiterer, that's a pretty funny name, Colorado Dispensary Loiterer, said about me, Smarty Pants Scott Adams thinks he's a mystical shaman, American patriot.
He soiled himself, period.
Now that wasn't the bad troll comment that I was speaking about.
This was just the low end.
Sort of the low end of the troll capability.
But I didn't think it could get lower until somebody commented on the comment.
So I'll read it again so you know what the other troll was commenting on.
Smarty Pants Scott Adams thinks he's a mystical shaman American patriot.
He soiled himself.
Period.
And then the other comment was, this.
With little fingers pointing up to the comment because it was so good.
This.
Now, I have a suggestion for you.
You should be sparing in your use of this.
It's kind of embarrassing if you use it on something like this.
Yeah, even the trolls have lost their game.
Well, I want better trolls.
Can somebody talk to Elon Musk about that?
Can we have a special badge for the high-level trolls?
And then when you see them, you'd be like, oh, there's a good troll.
Let's see what this one's up to.
Could be entertaining.
Well, Hollywood has created, and I just love this, a blacklist For people in the industry who are too pro-Palestine.
That's right.
You can no longer get a job in Hollywood if you spoke out in favor of the Palestinian suffering.
So... How good do you think the next movie is going to be?
So I tweeted this.
Imagine being a Hollywood director.
And let's say it's a few months from now.
You're trying to pull together a team.
Now remember, when you make a movie, you're pulling together a team for the first time each time.
It's a brand new team for each movie.
You know how hard it was to pull together a team when you had to do diversity?
You've got to have a diverse cast.
You've got a diverse crew.
Imagine the burden That puts on the creative process.
That you've got to have the right mix of people, so you can't really hire the perfect person for the part.
You might need to get the person who's, you know, okay for it, but satisfies your diverse needs.
Now add to that, that you somehow have to filter out all these blacklisted people who had the, quote, wrong opinion about Gaza.
Try to make a movie under those conditions.
You can't have any bad think and you got to have full diversity.
Yep.
Now the good news is it's still going to be easy to write the scripts.
It'll be hard to pull a cast together that doesn't want to kill each other.
But at least the scripts are still easy.
Tie somebody to a chair.
That's always a good one.
How about a I'm just brainstorming here, but what about a car chase scene?
Car chase?
What if, I'm just, I'm gonna go crazy here, what if it's a car chase, but helicopters are involved?
Helicopters.
No?
Better.
Gigantic vehicles such as garbage trucks?
Yes, garbage trucks or gigantic bulldozers that can plow through other cars.
How about that?
Has anybody done that yet?
Anybody?
Anyway, so at least the writing and the script will be simple.
Question for you.
Did we ever have free speech?
Because free speech is good and dead at the moment.
And what I mean by that is you only now have the free speech, and you can see from the example of the Hollywood blacklist, it's a good example, but you could add to that Owen Schreier going to prison for talking.
For talking.
He's going to prison for fucking talking.
All the J6ers who are overcharged.
You've got Trump who had a gag order.
Are you kidding me?
He's running for president with a gag order?
That's really happening.
I think that might be suspended at the moment.
And then you can look at all the people who got cancelled for having opinions that people completely agree with at the moment.
Such as me.
By the way, I might be the only cancelled person who has nobody who disagrees with my opinion.
Or at least on the part that got me cancelled.
Nobody.
When they hear it in context, everybody goes, oh, okay.
So we don't have any free opinion.
The only freedom you have is to be uninteresting and no challenge to the narrative.
So if you're a crazy person, you could probably get away with anything because people go, eh, we're not paying attention to you anyway.
And if you say things that maybe the narrative doesn't like, but you're not really influential, that's probably okay too.
You can't do anything that is speech that would change the status quo, because the people who own the status quo are going to kill you for it, because they like the status quo.
So I was challenged on this.
David Boxenhorn was saying, you know, has it ever been different?
It's always been true that if you said something abhorrent, you would get punished.
Would you agree?
It's always been true.
Anybody who said something that was that bad, who was going to pay for it?
Well, that's not my memory.
I don't have that memory at all.
My memory of my younger years is that if somebody said something horrendous, they didn't say it on social media because it didn't exist.
And then you say to yourself, my god, that's a horrendous opinion.
And then you would pick teams for the softball game, and you'd go play softball with the people who had the horrendous opinions.
Because their opinions never left their head.
Well, they left their head because they spoke it.
But nobody was influenced by it.
It didn't change my opinion, that somebody had a terrible opinion about something that was abhorrent.
In today's world, that person would be canceled Because they would say it or it would end up on social media.
And then all the prickly people would see it and go, oh, oh, I got another cancellation.
I got quite a boner about this.
Oh, I can't wait to cancel this enemy of mine.
And then they cancel.
So the point is, social media made everybody cancel a bowl in a way that just wasn't true when I was a kid.
You could have the worst fucking opinions when I was a kid, and we'd just hang out.
Because it just seemed like free speech.
I took free speech very, very seriously as a child because I was trained to be that way.
So if somebody said something that was just absolutely horrible, according to my own standards, it didn't bother me at all.
Not even a little bit.
I literally just shrugged and said, well, free speech.
Isn't that how everybody was in the 60s?
In the 60s, you would even hang out with somebody you violently disagreed with, because that's how things were.
You wouldn't not hang out with somebody because you hated their opinion.
That wouldn't even be sensible.
I'm not even sure I would even be able to wrap my head around that.
Because people have such different opinions, you would have no friends.
It just didn't make sense to, you know, not hang around with people because of their opinions.
Now of course it might be true that people had closer opinions, similar opinions where I grew up, so it wasn't a big issue.
But it was very different.
So I would add that the social media reach of it makes bad opinions travel farther.
But it also makes the feedback instant and vicious.
So at the moment, we don't have anything like free speech.
You only have the freedom to say things uninteresting or ineffective.
If it changes the narrative, somebody's going to get you.
You're going to be blacklisted in Hollywood.
Here's a question.
Will there be an election in 2024, people are asking.
And if you were to use the Tucker Carlson observation, which I don't think he invented, Was it Krakauer or somebody who came up with it?
The idea that whatever the Democrats are blaming you of, whatever they accuse you of, is what they're doing?
Was it Krakauer?
Oh, Rush Limbaugh said it?
Oh, Krauhammer.
Krauhammer.
Charles Krauhammer.
I think it was Charles Krauhammer.
I've heard it attributed to him the most.
But anyway, the idea is that you could actually predict the future By looking at what Democrats are accusing Republicans of and then just move it forward and say, oh, they're either already doing it or they plan to do it soon.
So let's test the theory.
Let's test it.
We have a perfect test here.
The test is, since the Democrats made a gigantic deal about January 6th being an insurrection, what do you expect them to do?
If this coming summer, that'll be the summer before the election, if this coming summer, and in all likelihood this will be the case if you just straight line it, Trump will have an insurmountable lead in the polls over Biden.
Insurmountable.
In other words, there's no way that they could cheat to change it.
There's just nothing they could do.
Under those conditions, would you expect Democrats to allow the election to go forward if they knew for sure that Biden would lose?
Well, the Charles Krauhammer, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson theory that what they're accusing you of, and we saw that with January 6th, is what they're doing or going to do.
So it is signaling very strongly That if the polls are really far apart, and there's nothing they can do to close it before election day, that they would find an excuse to disband the elections and take control.
Now, this is not my prediction.
Not my prediction.
This is what this prediction system or technique predicts.
It's a very, very strong signal That Democrats plan to do something sketchy to take control of the country and disband elections.
Mostly to keep Trump out of office.
Because Trump is an existential threat to a lot of them.
But more generally, even if you forget the concept of they always do what they're accusing you of, let's say you think that's nonsense.
You don't even need it.
It's 2024, it's the summer of 2024, and Trump has an insurmountable lead, like just a crazy lead like you've never even seen in politics.
There isn't any chance they're going to let him just go forward and win.
I don't think.
Even if you take away the whole Tucker Carlson part of it, you know, that theory, they can't let it happen.
So I think that they would have to use an external war, which would almost guarantee that there would be violence on the homeland.
The war is coming to you, you know.
You just entered a war.
Because there's not much chance that it's not going to become a hot war with Iran.
And there's not much chance that Iran doesn't already have some kind of saboteurs in the United States.
I would expect That our lights are going to go out.
So get ready for that.
I don't see any situation where Iran just rolls over and takes it.
That doesn't seem likely.
But I think that they would attack at least our grid.
So I would expect, yeah, I would expect, I don't want to give them any ideas, but the things that the Iranians could do just by being capable, because they're good at stuff, you know, they have a very professional Military intelligence situation.
What they can do to the United States would be completely crippling, if they put any effort into it at all.
And it looks like they would.
So, there will be a situation which would be conducive to cancelling elections.
And we saw that Zelensky did a trial run of that in Ukraine and it worked.
All he had to do was say, well, we're at war, so no election.
And the people said, oh, I don't love that.
But that whole thing about being at war is a pretty good reason.
I hope it's temporary.
I can't fight two wars at the same time.
I'm fighting the Russians.
I can't fight Zelensky.
Let's just let it go.
It's the perfect situation for the Democrats to just take control and have it for the rest of time.
Now if they did take control then they would presumably move quickly to make sure there were no credible institutions that disagreed with them that were still in power.
So they'd make sure they owned all the fact checkers and the think tanks and the media.
Of course they'd have to control the media entirely.
Which might involve taking Fox News out of the mix, taking Breitbart out of the mix, hiding the other sources so that you couldn't even Google and see a right-leaning opinion.
So that's what I would expect to happen next summer.
And the reason is they've convinced the country and themselves, half the country anyway, that Trump is Hitler.
And that he's gonna make, even if we're in a war, we could be in the middle of World War III, and the Democrats would still say, but you know, Trump would make this worse.
That would still be their argument.
You know, as absurd as that sounds today.
Alright, so look for that.
Now let's say there is an election, and let's say Trump wins.
I saw somebody suggest it would be a civil war if he wins.
What do you think?
Will there be a civil war if Trump were to win re-election?
Oh, you're saying no?
Yeah, I don't think it'll be a proper civil war.
Because for a proper civil war you need a more of a geographic situation, you know.
If the South has a completely different system than the North, that could be a civil war.
But if you have people within every city who are on both sides, and every side that there could be, it's hard to have a civil war when people, your neighbor, your wife, we're too intermixed.
As different as we are politically, You know, we live our lives connected.
So I don't think we have the right demographic, geographic, just a physical situation that leads to civil war.
And by the way, what would be the purpose of it?
What would be the purpose?
So I don't think there'll be a civil war in that sense.
But I think if you're not armed, it's a mistake.
I would say we're reaching a point in our civilization Where each household needs to have some pretty heavy firepower.
Because otherwise you're going to turn into Israel.
And by the way, there's no chance that it won't happen.
What we saw in Israel, unless you have some terrible solution such as in this book, which I won't describe, as long as there are people who have the same philosophy as Hamas, and apparently they're making new ones every day, It's guaranteed to happen here.
There's nothing that would stop it.
There's not even a little bit of friction.
You just look at your watch and you wait.
Okay, I guess it happened here.
We've got an open border, for all practical purposes, and they have the incentive and the means to do it, and it's in their long-range plan, and they've been very consistent about, Hamas has, about executing Exactly what they said they would do, which is try to kill everybody of one kind of person.
So, of course it's coming here.
And you don't want to be unarmed when they knock on your door because you're gonna have to shoot it down probably.
So, speaking of that, did you see Joel Pollack had a tweet today that I reposted that showed there was a CEO of some Israeli company Who, as soon as the trouble started, he was ex-military, grabbed his rifle, wrote a goodbye letter to his children, and drove as fast as he could toward the fighting.
He helped liberate one town, lived, went to liberate the second town, and lived.
And as Joel points out, how would you like your CEO to be that guy?
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Now, assuming he survives what comes next, which we hope for everybody, he's going to have a pretty loyal staff.
They're going to want to Literally, they're going to want to go to war with him, right?
That's what the CEOs always say.
They want to make you want to go to war with them, because the marketplace is war.
But he actually went to war for them.
Like, actually, literally, physically, went to war for his staff and the country.
You can't beat that.
He's also amazingly photogenic, so I think you'll see more of him.
He's, like, really photogenic.
One of the best-looking guys you'll ever see in your life.
His first name, however, is not perfect for TV.
I don't know if you noticed his first name, the hero.
I'm not making fun of him.
This is his actual first name.
Nimrod.
Nimrod.
Maybe is a popular name in Israel?
Now, I don't want to lose any respect for him, so full portion of respect, but it is an interesting name for a hero.
Anyway.
Looks like there may be there's a movement to make Mike Johnson the Speaker of the House.
Mike Johnson.
Could there be I'll now do Chandler Bing.
Could there be a more generic person?
Could there be?
First name Mike.
The most generic name.
Last name Johnson.
Is it because they don't have a Mike Smith?
Is there nobody named John Smith in Congress?
I feel like they had to find somebody that nobody knew.
Or nobody remembered?
We're gonna have to find somebody that nobody even knows is in the house.
Do we have anybody that you've just never even heard of?
And if you have heard of it, you're confusing it with some other name you heard because Mike Johnson's a popular name?
Oh yeah, we got a Mike Johnson!
Yeah!
Mike Johnson.
So I don't know if he'll win.
Some say he's too pro-funding of Ukraine.
Some say he's tremendously talented.
I watched a little clip of him talking to Majorca.
And if the only thing you knew about him was watching his clip dressing down Majorca, you would want him as the Speaker of the House, if not your President.
Yeah.
He is really good in public.
So if the Republicans wanted somebody who's impressive and doesn't look like a nut, he would be the one.
He would be the one.
But I do have some issues if he's a little too pro-Ukrainian funding.
There's probably some balance there that he's going to need to nuance a little bit if he wants to be successful.
I'm not sure how much he wants the job, if at all.
But we'll keep an eye on that.
Sam Altman had a post on X, got people yapping.
So Sam Altman is the Founder, CEO of Chad GPT.
So you would think of him as the godfather of AI, at least from the business sense, not the technical sense.
And he posted this.
He said, I expect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.
Now, where have you heard that before?
From me.
Right.
Yeah, the big risk of AI is that it's persuasive.
And I do think current technology could get it most of the way there.
But AI has one handicap for persuasion.
It can work around it, but its handicap compared to humans is that it can't watch its results in real time.
If it has more time, it can watch results slowly materialize.
It could do A-B testing with different messages and very rapidly just post them, see what people say on social media.
It could be as simple as having an account on X and just have it post things and see what the responses are and then adjust to see if it was persuasive or not.
So yes, in theory, the AI we already have with a few tweaks Would be the most persuasive thing we've ever seen.
It just needs to know how to get feedback.
If it closes that feedback loop, all bets are off.
A lot of people got mad at Sam for being sort of casually, just casually mentioning an existential threat to humanity that he's working on.
I'm sympathetic.
Or is it empathetic?
To his position, while also being very scared of it.
Here's the argument for Sam Ullman.
Somebody was definitely going to make an AI.
Now, that's not always a good argument, that somebody was going to do it anyway.
But it is in this case.
Somebody was definitely going to do this.
And I'm so glad that it's Americans.
I mean, it might be the difference between survival and not surviving.
We need to be the best AI wranglers in the world.
If you're not, you're no longer a superpower.
So, while it is super dangerous territory, that we're going to be unleashing some tools before we even know what the impact will be, that's also like most of life.
Most of life, if you're doing anything big, It's influencing people in both good and bad ways, and nobody can really predict how it's going to end up.
So AI is like that.
If you have confidence in American expertise and ingenuity, you would be a little less frightened about some horrible thing happening.
I feel like the people working in this field are our smartest people.
By the time you're doing engineering for AI or even head of the company, you're not a regular person.
You're like extra smart person.
Right.
This would be a case where the experts are certainly on the case.
Now you might say, Scott, you just said that the super smart people are smarter than the experts.
But what if the experts are also super smart?
I will still take the experts who are not in the field over them.
And the reason is, the experts in the field have a financial interest.
The people outside the field don't know as much, but they're looking at the whole field and they're not biased by a direction.
So, that's coming.
So I saw that UC Berkeley has changed their acronym.
It used to be just DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, but they wanted to add, you know, much like the LGBTQ plus thing keeps getting longer, they wanted to add a few letters.
So they wanted belonging and justice.
That's pretty good.
I like belonging.
We all like justice.
So now it's going to be DEI BJ.
DEI-BJ.
DEI-BJ.
You know, I'm not sure they thought it through.
I feel like, you know what their meetings would have been?
The Berkeley meetings?
They really would have benefited from, what's the word?
What did they need at this meeting to avoid this problem?
Diversity.
Diversity.
They needed some diversity at the meeting where they decided to add BJ.
Had I been there, and I know I'm not invited, in fact I've disavowed my old Alma mater, where I got my MBA, Berkeley.
I disavow them.
They disgrace me and embarrass me.
I don't even like to mention an affiliation with them.
Which is true, by the way.
But I would have suggested, you know, if you like belonging and you like justice, there are two orders that those letters could be in.
It could have been JB, D-E-I, JB.
But no, they went with BJ.
Which could suggest that at least one of the people in the meeting was me in disguise.
Because if I'm in disguise, I'm going to go with BJ every time.
It's just if I'm trying to be helpful, I'll be like, maybe just reverse those letters, avoid some mockery.
But now if I were in disguise, I'd be like, you know what would be really great to add to this?
Does everybody like belonging?
Anybody?
Is anybody against belonging?
No, right?
I knew it.
You all like belonging.
How about this one?
Justice.
Justice?
Justice?
Who's in favor of justice?
All right.
Who's in favor of adding both belonging and justice to DEI?
Everybody?
Everybody.
100%.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And that's it.
DEI BJ.
That's how I would have run the meeting.
All right, what are the odds of war with Iran?
Well, apparently we've moved two carrier strike groups into the area, 11 Burke-class destroyers, a number of Ticonderoga cruise cruisers, amphibious assault ships, various missile batteries, and multiple squadrons of jet fighters, F-16s, strategic bombers, and undisclosed assets.
Does that sound like a bluff?
Do you think we moved all those assets in there just to say, oh, you better not.
Don't don't get up any.
Well, I think it's bold.
If it worked as a bluff, we'd probably be happy about it.
I don't think it's a bluff.
To me, it looks every bit like because of the expense of moving all these assets.
And somebody said, oh, it's just naval assets.
That's not the expensive stuff.
I don't know.
I don't think we put all of our assets in one place like that without using them.
Can we think of any other time that America has massed military force and then not used it?
Go.
Tell me the times that we've massed Military force?
Well, except for practice.
Cuban Missile Crisis?
Pearl Harbor?
No, I'm talking about massing them to attack.
I don't think we massed forces to attack Cuba, did we?
I think we massed forces to blockade it.
North Korea?
I don't think we've massed forces for an invasion, have we?
So we've done things like blockades, but I can't think of any case where we put together a massive military force, parked it off the beach from our adversary, and then said, you know, we're happy now, everything worked out, glad that worked out, and we go home.
Yeah, I don't think so.
So I think we have here, unfortunately, the ideal situation for war.
For the people who want war.
I don't want war.
But for the people who want it, they have blundered into an ideal situation.
The situation is as follows.
Number one, there's a contentious election, and the commander-in-chief typically becomes popular when the bullets start flying.
So this is a way to get Biden's popularity up if we're in a hot war by the election time.
So it's possible the polls will reverse and people will just back the commander-in-chief because we do that kind of reflexively.
So that's one perfect reason for the Democrats.
Second perfect reason is that Iran is part of the Ukraine conflict and a big problem part because they might help Russia get past sanctions and they're providing drones and all these things.
So, it's just an extension of the Ukraine war, which is an extension of trying to take down Putin in Russia.
So the people who want to take down Putin are probably a little bit pro-Iran, because it looks like it might be part of the puzzle.
I'm not saying that's a good idea.
I'm saying that's how they might see it.
Next, we have an economy that can't survive the debt.
So we're heading towards certain doom.
If nobody's told you that.
I hate to be the first.
We don't have a plan to survive our debt.
There's no economist who knows how to do it.
None.
Nobody has even the slightest idea how we would survive this economically.
So what do you do when the game is rigged against you?
In this case we rigged it against ourselves.
But what do you do?
You throw the board over.
That's the only thing you can do.
If you're losing the chess match and there's no fucking way you can win it, like you can't even imagine a way to win it, you turn it over and you try to Kobayashi Maru or change the game somehow.
The only way I can think of doing that is starting a world war.
So a world war would do everything from make your currency worthless to bring in Bitcoin to who knows?
God knows what would happen.
But, it might be the only thing big enough to make debt go away.
You could easily see that all of our debt would just vanish, because it was, for a variety of reasons, the whole system breaks down.
And at the same time, to save us all, the government says, it's okay, it's okay, we'll issue this government crypto, and we'll just give you a bunch of it, because basically crypto is just made up, and then you won't have debt, You have this crypto, you can buy goods and services, and we will rescue the economy by having a war, which is the only context in which you could do something like get rid of your cash and make all your debt go away.
Like, a war is sort of the ultimate reboot with all of its badness.
So, I'm not saying anybody's planning that.
I'm saying that, unfortunately, the ideal conditions for war exist.
Unfortunately.
The other thing is timing.
The longer you wait, the more invulnerable Iran will become, and the more trouble they will cause.
So the longer you wait, the harder it will be.
There will never be another time when the public opinion is so well established in favor of Israel at the moment, at least those who were pro-Israel to begin with, and would probably Have a understanding opinion if America and Israel went hard on Iran.
At least it would make sense, right?
Nobody would say, that didn't make any sense, or what problem were you trying to solve?
Because it's obvious what problem.
Now, the experts Your David Sacks and your Elon Musks, the people who are higher than experts in my opinion, would say that war never works.
Just, that's it.
War never works.
Not a war that you start.
You know, sometimes you can defend yourself and that works.
But starting a war is pretty much zero chance of it working.
They always last too long.
They always go in completely unpredictable directions.
And it's the way that empires fall.
It's actually the way they fall by war.
So we have a situation where every variable is pointing toward war and all the signals from all the players are pointing toward war.
Everybody was prepared for war and they're more prepared now.
And there's never been a situation where our military-industrial complex is clearly calling some of the shots.
So you've got some group that could get rich if it's a war that stays contained, maybe less so if it's a world war, and it might look like a good bet to a lot of people, or at least in the short run.
If Israel just waits, let's say Israel decides to avoid large-scale war, and let's say they somehow, maybe with American pressure, figure out how to not go in and destroy all of Gaza City and create a global conflict.
Let's say they somehow, and I think it's unlikely, but let's say they do it.
And then things go back to something more like normal, Which is Ukraine still in a war, Iran is still bombing our military bases every day without response, or much response.
Iran is using their proxies to do it.
And they go back to funding Hamas and funding Hezbollah.
What happens to Israel in the long run?
Give me any scenario in which Israel can survive in the long run under the current scenario.
I can't think of one.
Because at some point, Iran and the other evil entities will have enough missiles, and maybe they do already, to obliterate all of the metropolitan areas in Israel.
And they might already have that.
Iran might already have accurate enough and sufficient quantity of missiles to eliminate Israel.
Now, I don't think they want to do that because that means eliminating Iran at the same time.
There's no way around that.
But, geography is kind of destiny.
And my guess is that if you go 500 years into the future, I'll pick 500 years because that's so far it's hard to imagine.
In 500 years, do you think that Taiwan and China won't be the same country?
I mean, I think it's inevitable.
In 500 years, you think that Israel will be in the middle of all these people who have missiles and a religious Reason to kill them all?
And you think it'll still be there?
I don't see how it could.
I mean, I don't have any imagination of how that could be possible.
So we are creating an unsustainable situation, no matter what we do.
If you go to war, it's unsustainable.
If you don't go to war, it's unsustainable.
What do you do?
Well, I suppose maybe there could be some technology that Shoots down all rockets.
Apparently the U.S.
has a sort of a laser beam kind of an anti-rocket thing that can fire from ships.
I don't think it's quite all the details are worked out, but because a laser beam doesn't need to be reloaded, if it has enough power source, maybe a small nuke or something, then one anti-aircraft weapon that's a big laser beam can take out Most of the missiles.
Because the laser beam reaches them kind of instantly, and it'll just go zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz That no laser could get them or they'd fly low so they can't see them or something like that.
So it's hard to come up with a scenario.
And by the way, I'm very pro-Israel, so I don't wish bad about anybody.
But I just don't have the imagination for how it lasts.
Because it's just too hard to defend that territory in the middle of all that badness.
Then I saw that, was it Blinken?
Who said, got to work on the two country solution.
So that would mean giving the Palestinians their own country.
How does that not make everything worse?
In what scenario is it not worse?
I mean, they tried it with Hamas.
Hey, Hamas, you can have your own territory.
You can be basically our neighbor.
And just do what you want to do.
And that creates Hamas.
And it gives them a safe space to operate from.
Why would they ever do that again?
It seems to me absurd that Israel would ever allow a two-state solution when any state that is formed will immediately start activating their terrorist forces to attack Israel again.
Which is not to say that the vast majority of the Palestinians are not peaceful people who just want to be left alone.
But you know which way it goes.
There'll be enough people in the population that won't harm that they will eventually be in charge.
How is Israel's survival threatened?
They have 90% of the land.
You're going to need to ask better questions than that.
Maybe you're new here.
All right.
So everything that looks scary has the same pattern.
Everything that's scaring us right now is a straight line prediction.
The imagination that you could sit in the present and say, OK, if things keep going the way they're going, it will be doom.
But that would be almost everything.
We are a world that is good at adjusting When it's emergency and we need to.
So probably the future will not look like anything we predicted.
Me or anybody else.
Probably.
Because there are just too many variables, right?
So why do we make straight-line predictions in the first place?
Like why would I even bother making a prediction when I know that the straight-line prediction method basically never works?
And the answer is you make straight line predictions so that you don't end up on that line.
That's how you warn everybody.
OK, if you don't do something, here's where you're going to end up.
That's very useful.
But it doesn't mean you'll end up there.
It means that's the warning to make sure you don't end up there.
All right.
In the weirdest, least expected news, the UFC Has announced that Bud Light will be its official beer.
I swear to God I'm not making that up.
Doesn't it sound like I'm making that up?
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, right?
I guess Dana White has a long history with Anheuser-Busch being a sponsor and thought it was the right move.
I guess Sean Hannity asked him if it was all about money, but he said that was the furthest thing from his mind was money.
Is that ever the furthest thing from anybody's mind?
Have I ever mentioned follow the money?
That the money is the thing that predicts no matter what people say about it.
If you follow his words, I don't know if those would predict.
But if you follow the money, yes, it does.
Yes, it does.
Scott, would you be willing to take Bud Light as your sponsor?
No.
No.
No, no, no.
I wouldn't want that embarrassment and reputational risk.
Scott, would you take $100 million for Bud Light to be your sponsor?
Well, you know, they're not all bad.
I'm sure their drink is quite delicious.
And although I'm anti-alcohol, well, it's not for me to tell you how to live your life.
Live your life.
Make your own decisions, really.
Yeah.
For $100 million, I would get real flexible.
So would you.
I know if you're thinking there, oh, Scott, you'd sell out.
Fuck you.
You'd take $100 million, and you'd know it.
Don't even pretend you wouldn't.
Right?
Because it's just beer.
So if Dana White did it for the money, he is in business.
Apparently he's a really good business person.
That's a fine.
That's fine.
Do you think anybody's not going to watch UFC because of Bud Light being the advertiser?
I don't think so.
I think the people who like UFC are just going to still watch it because they like it.
And the reputation of the UFC is so strong, among its fans, that they could handle the hit.
So I don't hate that a campaign that maybe hurt Bud Light for a while was sort of a warning shot, but I don't want them to go out of business.
So if Dana White can help rehabilitate them as a successful company, I don't know, that's not the worst thing in the world.
So I don't have any objection to this, it's just an interesting story.
What AI can do that blew my mind.
So the other day I was in my man cave.
I sat down in my electric drum kit and started playing around.
And if you don't know, I'm at the beginner level of drumming skill.
And suddenly something started coming out of my drumming that almost didn't feel like it came from me because it was way better than I know how to drum.
So when it started, I thought, there's something happening here that's almost magical.
It's like it's above my ability and I seem to be able to do it.
And I'm not talking like a little bit above my ability.
It was more like twice as good as my current ability.
So much so that I don't think I could do it if I sat down to try it right now.
Something happened.
That felt like the divine was channeling through me for a moment.
Probably I was just high.
So I had this experience while I was doing it.
And I thought, my God, does that sound amazing or what?
So I hit the record button and recorded it.
And I played it back a bunch of times and I thought, I really enjoyed listening to it.
And I wasn't sure if it's because I created it, because sometimes that makes you want to look at it more, but I put it in my headphones and I thought, holy shit, this is really moving me, like I can actually feel something.
So I called my composition Pacing and Leading, because some of you know that my long-term plan is building my talent stack, and one of the things I've always been interested in, besides just general interest in playing drums, was the persuasive ability of drums.
Drums are very persuasive and always have been through history.
You know, you do your drums before you go to war.
You know, tribes would do drums to dance around and scare the lions away.
So there's something about the drumbeat, something about dancing, that is hyper persuasive.
So I wanted to learn that and see if I could, you know, maybe find any Venn diagram there or find some way that those two talents could work together.
So what I realized was that the beat I had created, because it came out of my brain, and my brain is a certain way, it was pacing and leading.
So the beat, when it was consistent, was the pacing.
And if you liked the beat, then I could take you someplace that even music shouldn't go.
In other words, the beat was just sort of the beat.
But when I would deviate from it, sometimes I would do it violating musical Rules.
For example, my timing might be a little behind the beat or not.
And there would be some imperfections there.
Now, when I played it back, I could hear my own imperfections.
I could hear the timing problems and maybe I didn't hit a device just right.
But here's the weird thing that happened.
It was the errors that made it good to listen to.
It was the errors.
And that's why drum machines have not completely replaced people.
Because drum machines don't make errors.
When I listened to it, it was absolutely the errors that kept me just stuck to it, and why I played it a hundred times.
It wasn't the parts I did right, it's the parts I did wrong after I'd done something right.
So it's that order of things, that you do the wrong thing after you do the right thing.
The right thing is called pacing.
So if I do a good beat, and you're all bopping to it, I've paced you.
We're all on the same page.
I'm creating the beat, and you're matching it.
Now, I can lead you, because you're together.
We're connected.
Now I go, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
And maybe there's a mistake there.
Like, you can even pick it up.
It's like, I feel like that beat, like, was a little late.
You know that hit?
And you might be right.
But by then, because you've been paced, the leading would sound correct.
In other words, the wrong stuff, musically, would sound right to you because I'd paced you.
So that's one of the many things I'm looking at in terms of persuasion and beat.
So things got even more interesting.
So I posted it, but in order to get it on my phone, I had to just hold my phone in front of my drums, and I just replayed through my speakers.
So I replayed through my speakers and recorded a video of it, just of the empty drums.
So you can imagine now, that it's a recording of a recording, taken from a speaker, from a little phone.
So we're talking pretty low fidelity here, right?
So I put that on social media and an ex-user called Stormcrow underscore J-E apparently took that beat and used some AI magic and added some music to the background and turned it into a music video.
He says he spent 34 minutes doing it.
34 minutes.
You want to hear it?
What do you think?
hear songs look at the video music music music music music music
Let's go.
Stop.
Now, here's the thing you need to know.
I've always told you I like to have a series of ambitions which are reasonable.
You know, things I could actually accomplish.
But I always like to have at least one ambition, usually more than one, that is literally just stupid.
Like stupid impossible.
And for example, I've told you before, I long had the sort of fantasy that someday I would go talk to whoever was the president in the Oval Office because I'd done something worth being invited.
And that actually happened.
Now, what are the odds of that?
That that specific thought that I've had since I was young would actually literally happen?
And I didn't make it happen.
I just did my thing and then it happened.
So, here's another one.
One of the things I have long believed I could do, and this is just stupid, is write a hit song.
Now, what's stupid about it is I don't have any musical ability.
I don't have natural ability.
And I don't have trained ability.
I have neither trained nor natural ability.
I also barely listen to music.
It's not even a genre that I enjoy outside of utility.
I use it for exercise and stuff.
But I don't just listen to music.
I don't even like it that much.
So under those conditions, what are the odds that I could write a hit song?
Seems pretty unlikely, right?
But that's what makes it a cool ambition, is that it's so unlikely.
And then I'm listening to this damn thing, and I'm thinking, I could actually listen to that a lot.
If this were on the charts, it would actually do pretty well.
Am I wrong?
Am I wrong that this could be an actual commercial product?
I think it could.
Now, I had one sad realization.
Maybe I shouldn't admit it.
When I listened to the drums, I thought to myself, damn, I was a lot sharper than I remember.
I feel like, you know, when I played it back, and I was playing it back the other day, I thought, it wasn't that good.
And then I realized that it wasn't my drumming.
Somehow he either sampled a part of it and then it just repeats.
I think he just sampled the part that was tight.
So I had some tight parts and some loose parts.
I think he just took a tight part and then repeated it.
And do you know why I know it's not my drumming?
Because I drummed it in 6-4 time.
Accidentally, it was just sort of what came out of me, but this is 4-4.
So he took off a couple of beats and made it a 4-4 time.
So I'm not even sure I can claim that this is my beat, but it sounds pretty similar to what I created, and who knows if somebody else has created this same beat a million times in the past.
Anyway, it's a funny world, and this is one of those situations that makes you wonder, can you control the future by your thoughts?
Can you mentally imagine something so clearly that the simulation that we live in, or you could say God, delivers it?
I mean, how weird is it that I've had A 50-year ambition of writing a hit song without musical ability.
That's always been the key part of it.
That I would write a hit song without being musical.
It's really dumb to even have that goal.
But this came pretty close.
So that, ladies and gentlemen, is my show for the day.
Thanks for joining and thanks on YouTube for putting up with all of my trials and tribulations of trying to get the sound to work.
I'll tell you one thing I've learned is that nothing works better than a clip-on lavalier.
And this one's wireless.
They work really well too, if you remember to charge them.
But just the clip-on or the wireless clip-on for a podcast, it's about as good as you can do.
Now, I think it was yesterday I did a brief live stream with just the locals people and I was testing a sort of one of these big podcaster microphones.
I've had it for a long time but could never quite get it to do what I want.
So I was asking people, what do you think about this like big professional looking microphone?
Good or bad?
Here's what I learned instantly.
Number one, the better your microphone, the more likely people will say it has hiss.
I don't know why, but if it's a really good microphone, somebody's going to say it has this.
Somebody's going to say you've got the gain turned up too much.
Say, I can't turn up any gain on this.
I could put it through a mixer, but don't need to.
Other people said it ruined the visual because it was sort of partially in the picture.
Others said I would have to fix my lighting Because the microphone casts a shadow on me.
Which is true.
So, introducing the professional microphone would add something like six to ten failure points to what is already too complicated.
Six to ten failure points.
Like extra things that would bother the audience.
But if I don't do any of those things, and I just clip this little messy thing to my shirt, everybody says, oh, that's good enough.
I don't know why this doesn't create the hiss that they complain about on the good microphones, but there we are.
It's still 6-4 time?
I thought I counted it down as 4.
But I think I told you earlier I'm not musical.
And then somebody else is saying it's 4-4.
I thought it was 4-4.
I thought I wrote it in 6 and it came out as 4.
Anyway.
How many of you don't know what that means?
Four four time versus six four time?
Because I didn't know what it meant, you know, not too long ago.
Sort of do?
Let me see if I can explain it better than music teachers explain it.
So if you already know music, all you're testing is to see if it's a good explanation, okay?
Because I've heard it explained to me a million times and it's always like, what?
So here's my explanation.
I don't know if it's right.
This might be wrong.
But it's 4-4 or 6-4 or 6-8.
So it's a number over a number.
The bottom number is telling you what each of the notes are worth in terms of timing.
So the 4 is telling you that a quarter note is going to be like one beat.
And the top number is the more interesting one, because the bottom one is usually 4, right?
It's almost always 4.
So you can ignore the bottom one for all practical purposes, because it's pretty much always 4.
Sometimes it's 7 eighths or something, but that's weird.
Led Zeppelin.
But the top number, the 6 or the 4, is simply how many beats before it repeats.
In other words, does it go four beats, and then it repeats those four beats?
Or does it go six, and then it repeats the six?
That's all the six and the four are, right?
Am I wrong?
That is the correct... It's about the repeating of the beat.
Yeah, alright.
So, that would have been... One of the things I've learned about learning a new skill, like music, or art, Is that people who are the most expert at music and art, those are different skills from explaining things.
You know, communication and explaining things is like a whole, its own art.
And music is its own art.
It's hard to find somebody who would be like, you know, as good musically as they are at explaining.
So, that's one of the barriers to learning music.
My music teacher was amazing, by the way.
I'm taking a break from lessons, just because I was busy.
But let me give you an example of what makes them great.
The hardest part about learning music is feeling that you're failing the whole time.
Like you're not creating anything that's even in the general neighborhood of music.
For a long, long time, you're producing nothing of value.
Doesn't sound good to you, doesn't sound good to anybody.
So during that period, the important thing is that you stay enthusiastic and you enjoy it.
So my music teacher, who is also a fitness trainer, he had all the skills from the fitness training and the music that he would basically make sure that you felt you had progress.
So I'd be doing some crappy thing on the drums that even I didn't think was good.
And he would say something good about it.
It's like, oh, way better than yesterday.
Or, oh, yeah, you've got the kick down.
I think the kick was really good on that one.
And I would think to myself, oh, I thought it was terrible, but look at that.
Got that kick working.
And then I would feel good.
And then we would play together.
When I got to the point where I could keep a beat, he would play the guitar.
And he would just riff to whatever beat I wanted to put out.
So I'd be just knocking around and putting out a beat.
He'd be listening to my beat and adding these sick guitar licks over it.
And I'd be there like, this actually sounds good.
Like I would actually listen to this.
But it wasn't because of me.
The beat was pretty basic, but he was adding cool things on top of it, and I was thinking, I've made music.
Look at me.
I'm in a band.
I made music.
It felt amazing.
And then when he was done, he'd say, that was the best you've ever done.
You were keeping up.
I was just matching your beat.
And I'm like, really?
Really?
I did that?
It didn't feel like I was doing that.
But did I?
And then I'd feel all good, and I'd want to go to the next lesson.
This is also the lesson for fitness.
I'm going to drop you one of the most powerful reframes.
You may have seen it in this book, Reframe Your Brain, with lots of other reframes.
The best exercise for you to do, if you're new to exercise, and you're trying to get into it, and you're saying, gosh, there are a million things I could do, what do I do?
Like, what's the exercise I should do?
And what's the right way to do it?
Should I take a lesson to figure out how to lift things and use the bicycle and stuff like that?
And here's the reframe that fixes everything.
The correct exercise, every time, the correct exercise is the one you're willing to do.
That's it.
The one you're willing to do.
So the other day I was lifting weights on a live stream and it was sort of interacting with the audience and lifting some weights and just messing around in my man cave.
And some people commented that it was bugging their OCD because I wasn't using good form and I wasn't doing the right number of them.
I was just sort of doing it until I got tired.
So some people said, no, hey, maybe fix that form, maybe do sets of 10, something like that.
I reject that, absolutely.
I do, of course, know the proper way to do all of that stuff.
When I do it improperly, it's because that's the only way I'm willing to do it on that day.
So I got to exercise, imperfectly, but all I'm trying to do is make it a habit.
That's it.
I'm not trying to lift a certain amount, a certain way, a certain perfect way.
I'm trying to make my brain know that I exercise basically every day, one way or the other.
And that's not negotiable.
The only thing I accomplish is that I do something.
And it has to be what I was willing to do.
So last night, it was maybe eight o'clock, and I realized that I'd been so busy, I had not done any exercise.
And man, did I want to go to bed instead.
I wanted, I really didn't want to exercise, but I was in my man cave and the weights are right there.
So I picked up the smallest weights and sat in my chair and I watched, you know, watched some of the Warriors game.
And I thought, well, you know, at least I could do this and do this.
Cause it was the only thing I was willing to do.
I was absolutely not willing to do more than that.
And then once I'd done, you know, seven and a half pounds on each arm, Your arms start to wake up a little bit and they get thirsty.
Do you ever have thirsty muscles?
You start using them a little bit and they want to do more, right?
So I had accidentally made my muscles thirsty.
They just needed heavier weights.
It was bugging me that they were too light.
So then I moved it up a little bit.
Fifteens.
Did a little more, did a little more.
I finally had something like a weight training.
But if you were to rank it from 1 to 10 about how well done it was and how useful it was, no more than a 3.
I give it a 3.
100% success.
If you think that wasn't 100% success, then you're on the wrong metric.
The metric was, did I do it?
Yes, I did.
Yes, I did.
That's the only goal.
Because if you hang around with people who exercise, if you start caring about it, if you start trying some things, you will very naturally, without any effort at all, learn the proper way to do things.
You might someday get a fitness trainer.
It's a good idea for a lot of people.
But just being at the gym and watching people, you'll learn 80% of what you need.
If you're unsure about how a machine is used, just watch somebody using it.
And if that doesn't work, just stop somebody and ask them, hey, how do you do this one?
It's that easy.
You'll learn it over time.
So the worst mistake you can make with fitness, and I would say with diet too, is to put a timer on it.
It's nice to say, I'd like to lose 80 pounds and I'd like to do it by a year or so, but that shouldn't be your main focus.
Your main focus should be developing habits.
You should have an exercise habit that you can't even stop if you wanted to.
You're going to do something, even if you just walk out the door and just keep walking.
You're going to do it.
And then fitness with diet, you need some techniques that I talk about in some of my books.
But basically you need a system, not just willpower.
I use my willpower to avoid these bad foods.
That's not a system.
All right.
Enough about that.
I think I've changed your lives enough for now.
YouTube, I will see you tomorrow.
And I'm going to go talk to the locals people a little extra.
